| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling: as a Parsee's bill. Then Dicky, whose heart yearned to his wife and
the little son he had never seen--which, again, is a feeling no boy
is entitled to--enlarged the draft and wrote queer half-boy, half-
man letters, saying that life was not so enjoyable after all and
would the little wife wait yet a little longer? But the little
wife, however much she approved of money, objected to waiting, and
there was a strange, hard sort of ring in her letters that Dicky
didn't understand. How could he, poor boy?
Later on still--just as Dicky had been told--apropos of another
youngster who had "made a fool of himself," as the saying is--that
matrimony would not only ruin his further chances of advancement,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: this feeling which I have inspired, albeit unconsciously, I am
still far from sharing it, and the step which I am about to take
will show you still more plainly that I mean what I say. I wish
besides, to use, for your welfare, that authority, as it were,
which you give me over your life; and I desire to exercise it this
once to draw aside the veil from your eyes.
"I am nearly thirty years old, monsieur; you are barely two-and-
twenty. You yourself cannot know what your thoughts will be at my
age. The vows that you make so lightly to-day may seem a very
heavy burden to you then. I am quite willing to believe that at
this moment you would give me your whole life without a regret,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot: rain had washed away all possibility of distinguishing foot-marks,
but a close investigation of the spot had disclosed, in the
direction opposite to the village, a tinder-box, with a flint and
steel, half sunk in the mud. It was not Silas's tinder-box, for the
only one he had ever had was still standing on his shelf; and the
inference generally accepted was, that the tinder-box in the ditch
was somehow connected with the robbery. A small minority shook
their heads, and intimated their opinion that it was not a robbery
to have much light thrown on it by tinder-boxes, that Master
Marner's tale had a queer look with it, and that such things had
been known as a man's doing himself a mischief, and then setting the
Silas Marner |
